Zeke Banner and the End of an Era
by The Wolf Of Paris
Summary: A young man saves a young torchic from a pack of poochyena while out hiking in the woods near his home. After setting out on a journey to help the torchic evolve, and subsequently heal the debilitating injuries it received from the pack, the two become inseparable partners in the fight to change the worldwide Master-Servant relationships between humans and pokémon.


**AN: The time I spent away from here is, and will continue to be, totally unacceptable. I have plenty of excuses, but I plan on giving you none of them. Instead, let's get things back on track, shall we? (Edited to fix mistakes and for clarity. Thanks, St Elmo's Fire. I did edit slightly to remove the PoV changes, and do plan on making chapters about this new length in the future. Torchic hasn't been given a name yet and so there is not yet anything else to refer to him as. As such, "torchic (lower case)" refers to the species and "Torchic (upper case)" is used as a name. Finally, this used to be two chapters and part of Chapter 3. At St Elmo's Fire's suggestion, I'm fleshing out Chapter 1 by not only making it longer but making sure to allude more directly to the early relationship between the two and the pokémon-human dichotomy which drives the later story.)**

"Human Speech, including any pokémon using it"

 _/pokémon speech/_

(Thoughts of the PoV)

~(CHARACTER PoV)~

 **A Fateful Encounter**

~(Torchic PoV)~

The day was bright and cheerful, with not a cloud in the sunlit sky. The forest, normally dense and lush, thinned considerably around the clearing where a certain pokémon was lazing about. Unbeknownst to the lackadaisical youth, a moderately-sized pack of poochyena, about 15 or so, had gathered around. They had found the young bird after failing to hunt a nearby spoink who had conveniently evolved to a grumpig in the nick of time. Still licking their wounds from the grumpig's lucky victory, they settled to wait for their new prey to doze off before ripping it to shreds, lest another trick of fate take their meal.

As the young bird pokémon began to feel the first tendrils of sleep pull at his consciousness, he and the nearby pack were jostled by the same sounds. Footfalls, leaves rustling, and branches snapping. Then, a male voice: "Ow!" A human was coming. Quick to seize their prey before the human could take it away, the poochyena pounced. Suddenly, the bird's vision was a mass of gray and black fur, and it hurt all over. It couldn't think. Between the paws on its chest trapping it and the teeth mutilating its wings and face, the young pokémon could not pull together the energy or focus to fight back against its attackers. With what rightly should be its final breath, the young 'mon let out the loudest chirp its deprived lungs could muster as its world faded to black.

Suddenly, the world came flooding back in pure monochrome. As color returns to the pokémon's world, he begins to notice a few things. First, that there's something over him, but it's shaking all over the place. Suddenly, it dawns on the small bird that the peachy and red thing over it isn't shaking, he is. Venturing a glance to his left, he sees a see of grass passing quickly, easily much faster than he can run. Now paying attention to the horizon, he could tell that the day had shifted from mid-afternoon to evening, sunset quickly approaching. With his senses returning, the young bird turns his focus back to the shape overhead. Paying attention to where it was going, and not the weak being in its arms, was a human. He can't tell much about the human, especially with all the blood still running heavily down its face, but he could tell that the human was just reaching adolescence. The human's hair was a shiny black, speckled with red. This amused the bird greatly, though he was unable to laugh in this weak and delirious state. _/_ _What kind of human has spotted hair? That looks so stupid!/_ Finally, despite the torchic's best efforts, it sunk back into darkness.

Torchic awoke with a start and an Ember attack. He looked frantically for his poochyena attackers, on guard to fight his ambushers. A loud, obnoxious beep broke his focus and he finally began to notice his surroundings. To his left, Torchic saw the white circle on the wall that seemed to be the source of the grating high-pitched noise. _/_ _Shut up!/_ Torchic chirped before silencing the white thing once and for all with an Ember. As it began to melt, Torchic smirked, victorious over his incessant adversary. A crashing sound shook him out of his high and only then did he notice the human sliding feet-first into the room, face nearly singed by his Ember. Torchic's instincts scream at him to roast this fool alive, but he hesitates. He doesn't know why, but he recognizes this human. Torchic, intrigued by this nagging feeling that perhaps he shouldn't roast the bug that just barged into the room, decides to tolerate his presence. **For now.** As the petty human sat silently just inside the doorway, only the fire the torchic had unintentionally started lighting the otherwise-dark room, the torchic stared down towards its blood-soaked face and tried to recall where he had seen the panicked human before. It was only then that the disjointed, fuzzy memories of his trip out of the forest returned to the Torchic. This is the human that carried it away from the nigh fatal ambush. Unfortunately for the Torchic's curiosity, the weak and petty human he owes a life-debt is more than a bit scared of the wild pokémon it left sleeping in its home, seeing as it was pretty close to being roasted alive by the burst of fire. The detestable human snapped out of its shock as hot, melted white plastic from the now-ruined smoke alarm dripped onto its left cheek. "Ah!" the worthless human let out, reacting quickly to the burning plastic dripping onto its cheek, as it began to scramble backwards, hastily escaping from the dripping plastic and the amazing and handsome torchic it had brought into its den.

Abandoning his cozy fire, Torchic watches the human scrabble backwards in fright and begin to quickly hobble away. Deciding to get closer and investigate the human, Torchic hops down to the floor. Normally, he'd flap his wings to descend slowly and gracefully. Unfortunately, Torchic had yet to notice that his mutilated wings were bound tight to his body, and so his descent was fast and clumsy as he thrashed around trying to free his wings to no avail. The floor approached rapidly as he landed on his feet, but heavily off-balance. Despite his feet touching down first, the floor, eager to punish one who would try to defy gravity, continued to approach Torchic's face rapidly. As his forehead crashed into the floor, unconsciousness claimed the chick pokémon once again.

As Torchic drags himself back to consciousness for the third time that day in what surely must be a new world record, he vows to avoid bashing his skull against anything else, intentional or not. Looking back, he sees that the flaming blanket, fortunately not having anything close enough to spread to, has burned away, leaving only ash and a few glowing embers. Satisfied with his domination of all things flammable, Torchic struggles against the bindings on the small wings usually hidden just below his scruff. Finally resorting to tugging at them with his beak, Torchic finally tears off the bandages and begins to survey the damage. Staring down in disbelief, Torchic gawks at his prized wings... or at least what's left of them. Sure, the muscles and bone are still there, but not much else remains apart from some lose patchs of skin and feathers. Torchic can handle having been ambushed. His pride can even withstand the blow of being rescued by the lowest of the low, a human. But to have his wings taken away was more than enough to send the torchic over the edge. And so, Torchic sat down and wept.

~(Zeke (the human) PoV)~

Zeke sat huddled in his room, shaking both with fear and frustration as he began to ramble: "Gah, what do I do? I can't just let that thing run free in my home! But I can't risk getting burnt alive! Besides, it's just a pokémon. Aren't they supposed to listen to humans? Yeah, and I saved its life! That thing should be more grateful! I almost didn't make it out of there myself! If it weren't for..." Zeke stops abruptly. (What was that noise?) Zeke thinks as he leans in closer to the door. As the sound rings out through the house once more, Zeke can somewhat make out the sound of a bird pokémon's chirp, except... is it sad? "What, is it sad that it got attacked? Well, I guess I'd better go comfort the stupid thing, otherwise it's going to keep annoying me for the next half hour. Maybe once I calm down the beast, I can get it to eat a couple of oran berries and go back to its den or pack, or however it is torchics live. Once it's gone, I can relax, watch some tv, and feel good about my good deed for the day." At this, Zeke, now able to walk smoothly again, gets up to grab his metal baseball bat (Wouldn't want to rush back in there and not be able to defend myself.), and heads to the kitchen to grab the ungrateful bird some food.

Ignoring the bathroom doorway and the sniveling thing within as he passes, Zeke opens his pantry and grabs a handful of the almost-fresh blue fruit from the basket off to the left side. Backtracking, all while trying to tune out the grating noise of those stupid chirps, Zeke approaches the doorway to the bathroom he left the mangled torchic in. Leaning the bat against the door frame, intentionally making it easy to grab on the way out but still out of the bird's sight, Zeke sights lightly, hesitating, before slowly but loudly entering the room.

Zeke walks slowly but openly into the room and kneels down before the chick pokémon. With his empty hand on his knee and his berry-filled hand just out of view, Zeke tries to catch the bird's attention. "Hey there, little guy. Are you alright?" Zeke asks, feigning concern and acting as calm as is possible when kneeling in front of a wild pokémon that could roast someone alive on a whim. _/Torchic/_ is the reply Zeke gets, but the accompanying head shake tells him the answer is no. Noticing where the sobbing bird's vision is focused, Zeke adds: "Is it your wings?" Even through the language barrier, Zeke can sense the sarcasm dripping off the _/Tor tor chic!/_ like honey, along with a side of anger and frustration as a garnish. "Look, I'm sorry about your wings. I didn't get you out of there in time to save them," Zeke admits to the traumatized torchic before adding "but there's nothing we can do about that now. For now, I brought you some oran berries. They're supposed to accelerate the healing process or something like that." As Zeke held out his handful of small blue berries, Torchic, refusing to eat out of Zeke's hand, gave it a mighty peck. Recoiling from the sudden sharp pain, Zeke reflexively drops the berries as he pull back to inspect the bloody spot between his second and third knuckle where Torchic's beak broke skin. Watching the torchic quickly gobble up the fruit, Zeke sighs. (This is going to be a long day.)


End file.
